FREE music resources: Rhythm 1

Free music resources

These free nursery music resources can be used to help children to express music through movement. Moving to the beats in these pictures is a precursor to understanding musical timing. In addition, musical timing, or rhythm, has been found to be a predictor of skills like learning language, the difference between playing sports in the first or second team, and understanding STEM subjects including Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

Generally music notes separate time by a constant beat or pulse, and from there, it can be divided into twice as fast or twice as slow. And then twice as fast or twice as slow than that. And even twice as fast slow or twice as slow as that! Moving to the beat also introduces language concepts like syllables, and numerical concepts, like counting in 4’s. This is one way of introducing notation – by working out how many beats each word takes, e.g.: